News From The Web Ergonomics Lab
HCW Lab Member Gave a Talk at the 3d European eAccessibility Forum
Dr. Yeliz Yesilada was an invited speaker at the 3d European eAccessibility Forum. This conference has been running annually, since 1999. It is organised by the Association BrailleNet and French research organisations, and hosted by a Science Museum in Paris, the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie. It aims at promoting technology applications for a better inclusion of people with disabilities. Since 2007, the conference name is “European eAccessibility Forum”. This 3d European eAccessibility Forum focused on the application of mobile technologies for a better inclusion of people with disabilities at the workplace. Various situations will be considered, covering different needs related to training, mobility, access to information, communication. Concrete cases will be discussed. Solutions will be presented, ranging from commercial products to research prototypes. The speakers were specialists involved in organisations representing users and consumers with disabilities, research organisations and companies operating at a European level or worldwide. Further information about Dr. Yesilada’s talk can be found at: Accessible and Mobile Web: Same Problems, Same Solutions? W3C Recommendations on Mobile Web Applications.
HCW Lab Contributing To The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Members of the HCW are active members of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). This group is part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and develops strategies, guidelines, and resources to help make the Web accessible to people with disabilities.
Simon Harper is a member of the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (UAWG). The User Agent Accessibility Guidelines explain to user agent developers how to make their products more accessible to people with disabilities and for increasing usability for all users. This includes defining how browsers, media players, and other “user agents” should support accessibility for people with disabilities and work with assistive technologies.
Yeliz Yesilada contributes to both the Education & Outreach Working Group (EOWG) and the Web Content Accessibility & Mobile Web Group. The Education & Outreach Working Group develops strategies and materials to increase awareness among the Web community of the need for Web accessibility and to educate the Web community regarding solutions to Web accessibility. This includes developing strategies, and awareness and training resources, to educate a variety of audiences regarding the need for Web accessibility and approaches to implementing Web accessibility.
The Web Content Accessibility & Mobile Web Group looks into making a Web site accessible both for people with disabilities and for mobile devices. Users of mobile devices and people with disabilities experience similar barriers when interacting with Web content. By understanding the overlap between the two the business case for adopting Web Accessibility and Mobile Web Guidelines strengthens.
Darren Lunn participates in the Web Accessibility Initiative: Ageing Education and Harmonisation Group. This is a European Commission 6th Framework Project with the goal of increasing accessibility of the Web for the elderly as well as for people with disabilities. The group seeks to inform the development of extensions on WAI guidelines and supplemental educational materials which can better promote and meet the needs of people who have accessibility needs related to ageing. This includes providing educational resources focused towards industry implementers, including developers of mainstream technologies, assistive technologies, and Web designers and developers.
Papers Accepted at W4A’09 Madrid
The researchers from the HCW lab had two communication papers and a full technical paper accepted at W4A 2009. The W4A, also know as Web-4-All is co-located with the eighteenth International World Wide Web Conference, in Madrid, Spain.
The first paper titled “Audio Presentation of Auto-Suggest Lists” by Andy Brown, Caroline Jay, and Simon Harper describes a ‘thin slice’ through the SASWAT project. The project aims to base non-visual presentation on an understanding of how sighted users interact with information. This paper examines how sighted users interact with auto-suggest lists, and finds that suggestions are almost universally attended to. Attention is, however, given more to the top three suggestions than those lower down the list. A non-visual implementation is proposed, and contrasted with current solutions.
The second paper “Combining SADIe and AxsJAX to Improve the Accessibility of Web Content” by Darren Lunn, Simon Harper, and Sean Bechhofer describes how the SADIe transcoder can be combined with the AxsJAX framework to improve Web content accessibility. Such an approach allows users to access static content using a consistent set of key presses in a manner akin to an online application. This demonstrates the flexibility of the SADIe approach of annotating Cascading Style Sheet elements and supports the use of SADIe as a lightweight method for allowing Web designers to make use of AxsJAX without requiring knowledge of the underlying AxsJAX technologies.
Finally, the full technical paper “Guideline Aggregation: Web Accessibility Evaluation for Older Users” by Giorgio Brajnik, Yeliz Yesilada and Simon Harper, uses set theory to create a validation scheme for older users by combining barrier types specific to motor impaired and low vision users, thereby creating a new “older users’” category from the results of this set addition. To evaluate this approach, a user study was conducted with the Barrier Walkthrough (BW) method with four pages, 19 expert and 49 non-expert judges. This study shows that the BW generates reliable data for the proposed aggregated user category and shows how experts and non-experts evaluate pages differently.
HCW Lab Member gave a talk at Public Sector Online 2008
Dr. Yeliz Yesilada gave a talk at the Public Sector Online 2008 about Developing and delivering mobile content. Full presentation is available at http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~yesilady/presentation/yelizyesilada-2008.pdf. The conference was organised by Kable events and focused on engaging citizens through online services. The aim of the conference was to discuss practical ways to meet standards and effective ways to improve public services online.
Relationship Between Mobile Web and Web Content Accessibility Working Draft Published
The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group and the WAI Education and Outreach Working Group have published an updated Working Draft of Relationship between Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Our Lab member, Dr. Yeliz Yesilada is one of the editors of this document.
The groups encourage people to start by reading Web Content Accessibility and Mobile Web: Making a Web Site Accessible Both for People with Disabilities and for Mobile Devices, which shows how design goals for accessibility and mobile access overlap. A third document, Experiences Shared by People with Disabilities and by People Using Mobile Devices, provides examples of barriers that people (without disabilities) face when interacting with Web content via mobile devices, and similar barriers for people with disabilities using desktop computers.
Paper Accepted at ASSETS’08 SRC
A Student Research Competition (SRC) paper by Tianyi Chen, has been accepted at the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, Halifax, Canada. The paper titled “Input to the Mobile Web is Situationally-Impaired”, investigates the common problems experienced by mobile Web users and disabled desktop users. In the paper, it is argued that, leveraging research between these two domains is important because if common problems exist, available solutions can be migrated from one domain to another. For proof of concept, a study was conducted with mobile Web users. The study replicated a previous experiment which investigated keyboard and mouse errors of motor impaired desktop users. Results confirm that these two domains share similar problems with regard to typing and pointing. Following the same methodology, further investigations on the problems shared by mobile Web users and disabled desktop users for output, will be undertaken.
Mobile Users Make Same Mistakes As Disabled PC Users.
The first set of results from research funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) indicates that many able-bodied people make the same errors – and with similar frequencies – when typing and ‘mousing’ on mobile phones, as physically impaired users of desktop computers.
According to researchers in the School of Computer Science working on the RIAM (Reciprocal Interoperability between Accessible and Mobile Webs) project, mobile owners press the wrong key and press the same key repeatedly by mistake. They also found mobile users tend to click the wrong area of the screen, click the screen multiple times in error, and make mistakes when trying to drag and drop information.
“These types of errors have been a big problem for physically impaired users for a long time,” said Dr Yeliz Yesilada, a senior researcher on the project. “But solutions have been developed for all of these problems in the form of small assistive computer programmes, which supplement Windows and Mac operating systems.”
For the study, researchers at Manchester re-analysed earlier work by scientists at the University of Edinburgh who had looked into the problems of physically disabled users. They then re-ran the experiments with mobile users and found that a significant correlation existed between the two user groups.
“In recent years solutions have been built to help disabled users and it is hoped these solutions can now be applied for the benefit of mobile phone users,” said fellow researcher Tianyi Chen. “By using solutions developed for disabled users we can help handset manufacturers, such as Nokia and Sony, to reduce the time we all spend correcting errors on our mobiles.” “Software already developed for PC users with disabilities could automatically correct erroneous commands and help reduce those annoying times when you accidentally cancel a text message or call someone by sitting on your phone.”
The two-year RIAM project is supported by £205,000 funding from the EPSRC. The technical report on the research can be downloaded from http://hcw-eprints.cs.man.ac.uk/51/.
HCW Lab Member Joins the W3C Mobile Best Practices and Education & Outreach Working Groups
Dr. Yeliz Yesilada from HCW lab has recently joined the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP) Working Group and the Education & OutReach Working Group (EOWG). The MWBP Working Group aims to develop a set of technical best practices and associated materials in support of development of web sites that provide an appropriate user experience on mobile devices; and the mission of the Education & Outreach Working Group (EOWG) is to develop strategies, and awareness and training resources, to educate a variety of audiences regarding the need for Web accessibility and approaches to implementing Web accessibility.
Experiment of Text Entry and On-Screen Item Acquisition on a PDA
The HCW lab is currently running an experiment with regard to input (text entry, pointing, clicking and dragging) with a PDA. The experiment is part of the RIAM project, and the purpose is to identify typical performance errors regarding input with a PDA, then compare those with errors already established on motor impaired users, and thus build the link between these two user domains. This experiment has been approved by the Senate Committee on the Ethics of Research on Human Beings (study reference number 07188).
Procedure
This experiment consists of three sessions:- The first is the background session. In this session you will be asked a few questions about your previous experience on using mobile phones and PDAs.
- Next is the main session. Here we will present you a PDA and a set of tasks. The tasks cover the basic input activities, such as typing, pointing, clicking and dragging. You will need to conduct those tasks on an experiment Web site loaded from the PDA.
- The last is the feedback session, in which you will be asked to give feedbacks about the tasks you have just done. For example, you will be asked “how difficult do you find clicking with a stylus?”
The experiment will last from 30 minutes to more than 1 hour, depending on your performance. Note that we are not testing you personally, so there is no right or wrong thing to do. Also note that for our future analysis, the whole experiment will be video recorded, provided you are comfortable with this.
Contact
To take part, please contact Tianyi Chen or Dr. Yeliz Yesilada:
Kilburn Building Room LF1,
Oxford Road,
Manchester,
M13 9PL,
UK
Papers Accepted at HT07
Human Centered Web Lab Members had three papers accepted at the Eighteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia:
- Experiments Toward Reverse Linking on the Web, Full technical paper by Yeliz Yesilada, Darren Lunn and Simon Harper;
- Image Seeds: A Communal Picture-based Narrative, Demonstration paper by Darren Lunn;
- Experiments Towards Web 2.0 Accessibility, Poster presentation by Elizabeth Stringer, Yeliz Yesilada and Simon Harper.